Typical customer call centers use traditional call-assignment processes such as round-robin based methods or skills-based routing methods to route a call from a customer to a call center agent when the customer dials in. In a round-robin based method, agents are generally assigned to only one queue of incoming calls of a certain type to answer the calls sequentially. This means that agents who can deal with a range of call types has to be reassigned to different queues at different times of the day to make the best use of their skills, or face being exposed to a wide variety of calls for which they are not trained. With skills-based routing, the skills needed for a particular call are often assessed by the dialed telephone number, as well as choices made in any associated interactive voice response (IVR) system. With this assessment, a skills-based routing system then attempts to match the call to a suitably trained agent. These traditional processes, however, lack an automatic analysis of historical and/or live conversations. For example, current call center routing systems cannot measure various emotions of a customer and an agent's ability to handle such emotions, and therefore cannot apply such knowledge in the process of routing the customer's call.
Therefore, it is desirable to develop a new call routing system and method capable of dynamically allocating a call from a customer to an agent based on an analysis of the emotions of the customer and based on the agent's ability to handle the emotions.